Hi,
The current charter [1] of our Working Group will expire at the end of
June this year; it is pretty clear that our work will not be done by
then and thus will need to extend or renew our charter.
Given that our understanding of the work that needs to be done has
evolved quite a bit, and also due to the lack of involvement of
potential implementors of our work in the group, the Chairs and Staff
Contacts are suggesting that we should try to refine our charter and
have it reviewed by W3C Advisory Committee.
To that end, I've been working on a proposed new charter for the group:
http://www.w3.org/2010/11/DeviceAPICharter.html
This charter introduces several important changes — which are all up for
discussion.
The most important change is the removal of the Policy Framework as a
deliverable of the group. That proposed change is motivated by the
following reasons:
* the work has only had limited traction in the group so far,
* the policy framework is architecturally independent of the APIs, while
its bundling with our work on APIs has been the source of
misunderstandings from potential implementors.
To reflect the removal of the said framework, we're proposing to rename
the group to "Device APIs Working Group" — although the group would
still be referred as DAP since that's now a well-known moniker.
The removal of the Policy Framework doesn't mean that the group would
stop working on security. On the contrary, the new charter puts a strong
emphasis on the needs surrounding security and privacy (privacy which
was actually missing from the previous charter.) We've already received
feedback that the current wording around security isn't satisfying and
welcome proposed changes to the text.
Finally, the new charter tightens the scope of our APIs to reflect the
ones we've actually been working on — the very broad scope of our
current charter has been an explicit showstopper for some W3C Members to
join the group.
You can see a diff between the two versions of the charter at:
http://www.w3.org/2007/10/htmldiff?doc1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2009%
2F05%2FDeviceAPICharter&doc2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2010%2F11%
2FDeviceAPICharter.html
We very much welcome feedback and suggestions on this new charter, which
will also be discussed during our F2F in Seoul.
Dom
1. http://www.w3.org/2009/05/DeviceAPICharter